Demonstration and Implementation of a Fuel Saving Large Scale High Power Lithium Ion Battery on a Vessel

Various use-cases, such as hoisting and lowering of drill pipes and heave compensation of the drill string have the specific characteristic that they need a large amount of power to be available, but the actual average power used is much less. For a conve ntional diesel engine system to respond to this kind of fluctuating power, one has to keep enough engines running to be able to respond to the maximum power need. As noted above, this mean that the engines spend much time ideling at very low loads - which is very inefficient. Also the fluctuating power is an inefficient mode of operation for the diesel generators causing loss of fuel efficiency and shorter maintenance intervalls. The objective of this project is to couple a large high power optimized bat tery system with conventional diesl generators, allowing the battery to handle the strong fluctuations in power need while the engines maintain a base load of energy, running at very efficient load. When the system needs more energy than the engine provid es, the battery will provide that energy. When the system needs less energy than the engine base load, the extra energy is used to charge the batteries. Furthermore, the batteries can also in some cases be charged using "regenerative braking" techniques n ow common in electric vehicles, where energy is recuperated when a load is being lowered, and fed into the battery. As a result this innovative system will have the following economic and efficiency advantages: -The system will be able to perform the same functions using fewer engines, running at a much higher efficiency -As a result, the total amount of hours of operations of the engines will be dramatically reduced and since the maintenance of engines is a direct function of the hours of operation, ther e will be significant cost savings from reduced maintenance. - Batteries will be able to use regenerative braking techniques to recuperate energy which is otherwise wasted.